> Increasing rollbacks of various right and protections - labor, environmental, consumer - seem to be happening lately.
I take issue with the "rights and protections" phrasing being used in the exact opposite sense of what they mean in this case. The underlying issue is that the vague wording in the CWA was has come to be interpreted expansively and that the consequences of even unintentional violations can be crushing. Here, ordinary people were about to build a house not obviously in "navigable waters", and they were threatened with $40,000 per day in sanctions.
Also, calling it a "rollback" is deceptive phrasing that it implies going back to the time before the CWA was enacted. It would be more accurate to note that the law has been interpreted more and more broadly every year since its creation and that some outer limit is being set on what constitutes a "waterway" or "pollutant" (neither are being interpreted in a way that most people would expect).
I get that some HackerNews commenters can easily fall into the environment-good/conservatives-bad mentality, but this case can also be viewed as falling into the same category as Aaron Swartz being crushed by an expansive and overly punitive interpretation of the CFAA.
Relevant excerpts:
> Within a few years, the agencies had “interpreted their jurisdiction over ‘the waters of the United States’ to cover 270-to-300 million acres” of wetlands and “virtually any parcel of land containing a channel or conduit . . . through which rainwater or drainage may occasionally or intermittently flow.
> By the EPA’s own admission, nearly all waters and wetlands are potentially susceptible to regulation under this test, putting a staggering array of landowners at risk of criminal prosecution for such mundane activities as moving dirt.
> The CWA is a potent weapon. It imposes what have been described as “crushing” consequences “even for inadvertent violations.” Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co., 578 U. S. 590, 602 (2016) (Kennedy, J., concurring). Property owners who negligently discharge “pollutants” into covered waters may face severe criminal penalties including imprisonment.
> The Act prohibits “the discharge of any pollutant” into “navigable waters.” 33 U. S. C. §§1311(a), 1362(12)(A). It broadly defines the term “‘pollutant’” to include not only contaminants like “chemical wastes,” but also more mundane materials like “rock, sand,” and “cellar dirt.”
> And due to the Act’s 5-year statute of limitations, 28 U. S. C. §2462, and expansive interpretations of the term “violation,” these civil pen- alties can be nearly as crushing as their criminal counter- parts, see, e.g., Borden Ranch Partnership v. United States Army Corps of Engineers, 261 F. 3d 810, 813, 818 (CA9 2001) (upholding Agency decision to count each of 348 passes of a plow by a farmer through “jurisdictional” soil on his farm as a separate violation)
When vague laws with powerful punishments are interpreted expansively and aggressively by enforcement agencies, we should all hope that the Supreme Court should set limits.